SAN FRANCISCO / Gates money pulled from small schools / Lack of master plan a possible reason for foundation's decision

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has withdrawn its financial support of small schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, signaling that the nationwide trend toward creating middle and high schools of fewer than 400 students has fallen flat in San Francisco.

The schools -- which stress personalized education and are seen by supporters as an answer to big, urban schools in which kids aren't well known and drop out in high numbers -- have caught on like wildfire in many cities, including Boston, New York and Oakland.

Oakland Unified, in fact, has 28 small schools supported by $25 million from the Gates Foundation, which has backed the trend in districts around the country as part of its call for major high school reform.

But after giving $2.5 million to San Francisco over the past two years, the Gates Foundation last month reduced this year's allocation to small schools by 30 percent and halted all new grants to the schools. Barbara Semedo, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said the grant cycle simply ended; she wouldn't discuss the matter further.

School board members and some principals of the small schools in San Francisco said they were disappointed but not surprised that the Gates Foundation backed out. They said the district never created a master plan for the schools and developed them in a slipshod manner. Others said San Francisco loses so many students each year that the new schools were not necessary because so many schools are already small.

San Francisco has seven schools formerly backed by Gates under the small school movement, though only two of them are free-standing schools serving mainstream students. June Jordan High School in the Excelsior district and Aim High Academy, a middle school in the Haight, both opened in September 2003.

The others include small "learning communities" within Balboa and Mission high schools that allow groups of students to work with the same teachers over multiple years, as well as a school for students in the juvenile justice system called Y-Tec. There is also a part-time school for budding architectural students called Build S.F.

An independent panel chose the small schools, but Superintendent Arlene Ackerman also gave Gates grant money to another small middle school, Gloria R. Davis.

While those small schools are faring well, board members and principals who support the movement say they are concerned that no new ones started up this year, and there are no plans for more. They say it was a promising movement that simply fizzled -- and existing small schools may be left to sink or swim.

Ackerman said Gates pulled out of San Francisco because she is leaving her post in June.

"They're very nervous about San Francisco and what's going to happen with me leaving," she said. "I don't think this is going to be the first time we see this backing off of San Francisco until things are stabilized, unfortunately."

But others blame Ackerman herself for the end of the small schools movement. Mark Sanchez, a school board member who has frequently butted heads with Ackerman, said she doesn't give the small schools the autonomy some say they need to succeed and keeps too tight a grip on the schools' hiring, curriculum, assessments and scheduling.

"The superintendent made it clear that she didn't want the autonomy, and the Gates Foundation made it clear the autonomy was essential for further funding," Sanchez said. "They wanted a written policy, and the district wouldn't give it."

But Ackerman declined to take responsibility for the withdrawal of the funding, saying the reason she isn't opening more small schools is that she hasn't received any good proposals for them.

Sanchez and Ackerman agreed that the superintendent has been much more focused on her Dream Schools initiative than on the small schools movement. The Dream Schools plan involves overhauling low-performing schools by adding student uniforms, longer hours, Saturday school and a more rigorous curriculum.

"The Dream Schools are different for me because I have a moral and legal imperative to fix these underperforming schools," Ackerman said. "I don't have a moral and legal imperative to create new small schools."

School board member Jill Wynns said it is problematic to create new small schools in a district that is losing students by the hundreds every year.

"I personally think we sort of put the cart before the horse a little bit," said Wynns, referring to opening the schools with no plan for how they would fit into the district's overall reform program.

The disagreements also leave the existing small schools in the lurch because they had expected to receive the same level of Gates funding this year that they had received in prior years.

But last month, the Gates Foundation told the district that funding to those schools would drop by about 30 percent.

The money is essential, the principals say, because the schools must pay the same overhead as larger schools. Although they have fewer teachers, they have the same number of principals, secretaries and custodians to pay. At the same time, they receive less state funding because they have fewer students.

Alec Lee, founder of Aim High, said that school would lose $70,000 this year.

"What's hard about this is it's October, and we've hired people and built a program," Lee said, adding he was scrambling to find other funding to pay the staff.

Matt Alexander, principal of June Jordan, said he worries about being at the forefront of a movement that has fallen apart.

"It's frustrating that more schools haven't opened," he said. "We think we're doing a good job, but we know that in order to succeed, we need to be part of a system-wide innovation."